Syria Al Qaeda Affiliate, Al-Nusra, Readies Major Aleppo Offensive

The Syrian city of Aleppo may soon be overrun by fighters from Al Nusra: Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.

“The escalation of the situation in a number of Syrian regions is first of all linked to the goal of the leaders of Al-Nusra Front and factions allied with it to derail the process of reconciliation,” head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, Lt.-Gen. Sergey Kuralenko, said in a statement on Monday.

“In the Aleppo region, Al-Nusra Front leaders are finishing forming an assault group totaling over 6,000 militants in order to block the government troops in the city with a strike from the east, while in the north they seek to cut off access to the city of Nubl.”

Obviously, the ceasefire in Syria is between internationally recognized groups and the Syrian government, not between them and terrorist organizations like Al Nusra and ISIS. That’s why those forces can freely be attacked by everybody — the opposition and Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

And that’s a good thing too, because — from the looks of it — Al Nusra is preparing to take over in Aleppo. The Al Qaeda terrorists have been attacking the city for a while now with rocket launchers and mortars.

The Russians are calling on the United States to talk to “moderate” anti-Assad forces in the region to help Assad take them on. As per Kuralenko:

Once again, we call on the American side to continue [to] work with moderate opposition units it controls to push them towards joining the ceasefire regime, providing [an] exact outline of the areas they control and pulling groups that observe the ceasefire terms out of territories taken by Jabhat al-Nusra and other international terrorist organisations.

That sure sounds like a plan: if these terrorists are to be defeated, they have to be attacked by both Assad and the moderate rebels.

Sadly, there’s a problem: Assad’s forces are occupying the outskirts of Damascus. The moderate rebels demand they retreat. If they don’t, the rebels (led by the Free Syrian Army, or FSA) threaten to end the ceasefire, which would create new and even bigger problems in the weeks ahead. At that point, it’s expected that the FSA and Assad will once again have a go at each other, thereby giving Islamic terrorists the opportunity to conquer more territory.